Firedrop Extentions

• Firedrop RPMs
• Wax RPMs
• Templates

Firedrop is an offline bloggin tool, written completely in Python and hence being platform independent. Firedrop is available under

http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/firedrop2/

Unfortunately, version 0.2.2 of Firedrop has some minor bugs.

1. The Open button's label becomes blue when the mouse pointer hovers over it and remains blue. Afterwards the button does not respond to mouse clicks. You have to use the file menu if you want to open another project. I wrote a patch which solves this problem: firedrop2-0.2.2-noblueopen.patch.txt. To apply this patch change into the Firedrop's installations directory and type

   patch -p0 < firedrop2-0.2.2-noblueopen.patch.txt

2. Firedrop creates a configuration directory since version 0.2.2. Nonetheless it still creates the file firedrop.ini in the current working directory. Another patch firedrop2-0.2.2-inifile.patch.txt solves this problem as well.
3. You can change the default entry style in entry.ini in Firedrop's configuration directory (textile, sextile, markdown, etc.), but this information has been ignored until now. The patch firedrop2-0.2.2-createnewentrydialog.patch.txt changes the code so that this entry in you config file will be used.
4. Here is another lousy bug: the file entry.ini in the configuration directory has been set to defaults and rewritten every time the dialog for new blog entry was opened. The patch firedrop2-0.2.2-entry_ini.patch.txt changes this behaviour.
5. The menu entry rot13 produces an error message. This happens because the number of parameters which are passed to the function has changed, but the ROT13 plugin did not. The patch firedrop2-0.2.2-rot13.patch.txt corrects this bug.
   But it is still impossible to encode a text with non-ASCII characters, for example with german "Umlaut" like ü.
6. Originally all self defined macros are applied after a markup preprocessor has produce HTML code from the entry's body. But if you macro produces a block level element, like  <div> then it will lead to invalid HTML code, because the markup preprocessor most likely sourrounded the macro by a tag like <p>. The patch firedrop2-0.2.2-macros_before_markup.patch.txt changes the Firedrop code. Macros will be intepreted first. The following markup preprocessor will only see embedded HTML code.

In addition I have created and integrated into the RPM package another patch, which makes Firedrop produce correct <br> and <hr> (line break and horizontal rule) tags. It is important if you have the ambition to produce pages in valid XHTML.

Firedrop RPMs

I made RPM packages of Firedrop. They were built under Fedora Core 5 but should work with Fedora Core 4 as well. Both patches were integrated in the package. Since Firedrop has been written in Python, it does not make sense to rebuild the package for another architecture. If you are still interested in building your own Firedrop package you will find the spec-file an links to both patches below.

Wax RPMs

Wax is a library which is needed by Firedrop. Wax can be downloaded from http://zephyrfalcon.org/labs/wax.html or http://sourceforge.net/projects/waxgui.

Templates

A program to write a blog is only the first step. One also needs usable templates to make the resulting blog look reasonably. I tried to create a template compatible with MovableStyle and with integrated support for HaloScan comments.

Last change on: Sonntag, 5. Oktober 2008, 22:48:51